


Bright Red City

by lindenwaverly



Category: Batman (Comics), DCU (Comics)
Genre: AU, AU where the city is alive?????, Cass has a destiny, Jason is an urban legend, M/M, this kind of makes sense in my head, tim is obsessed with investigating the urban legends, we just don't know, where are Dick and Damian?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-08
Updated: 2015-09-08
Packaged: 2018-04-19 18:39:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4756868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lindenwaverly/pseuds/lindenwaverly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Jason was young, Gotham started calling him. People disappeared in this city. Jason knew where they went.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prelude

When Jason was young, Gotham started calling to him. It didn’t feel like he was being called at first – it felt like they were talking. He knew which dark corners were just dark and which held a figure in the shadows. He knew the tunnels under the city – not like knowing a place but knowing a person, exploring every twist and turn because the tunnels wouldn’t let him get too lost. He knew shortcuts which were perhaps a little too short and which no one else could follow him through.

A walk was a conversation with the city. If he set out looking for food or shelter he’d come across it quickly. Gotham kept up her side of the conversation, blocking off a bad route with building work and directing him down another with a tasty smell or a burst of colour. He was hungry for colour back then, and Gotham gave him the little it had, in burst of small flowers and stained glass.

Sometimes he’d head out to find his mother and he’d end up walking in circles, always turned back towards home.

There were things he didn’t ask the city for – didn’t know how to ask – that it gave him anyway. Another blanket when the heat got shut off. Stray kittens that rubbed their little heads against his hands and trusted him. The broken necks – car crashes, construction site accidents – of a few of his mother’s worse boyfriends. The stories.

People disappeared in Gotham. Jason knew where they went.

 

-

 

No one spoke about it, but everyone knew the city changed. A side street swallowed up; a regular at the bar known by face and not name gone like he never existed. An office block growing shabby and tired overnight while Wayne Towers still stood as darkly gleaming as the day they’d been built.

These were the small shifts, little earthquakes that sent out enough visible ripples for people to notice. Less noticeable – and definitely not noticed by Jason, then thirteen and angry – were the slow tectonic shifts. Carmine Falcone began to have the strange sense that Sal Marone was not his biggest problem, and kept all the lights on in his office at night. In Gotham Central Park, the bushes sometimes fell dead silent even in the strongest wind. Jim Corrigan put down his drink and began, for the first time ever, to think about his immortal soul.

 

 -

 

When Jason was fifteen, he found his mother dead in the bathroom.

He sat and cried for a while. It felt like a physical reflex, like throwing up, and he just had to wait till it was done. He sat until his throat was raw and his face was snotty and he was furious at his inability to stop fucking crying.

Then he climbed out of the window and took off into Gotham.


	2. Players to Places

“It’s an urban legend,” said Vicki, brushing Tim’s notes aside. He flattened his mouth into a thin line and willed himself some patience.

“They’re all urban legends, Vicki. The crocodile man, the mud-monster, the thing in the park – that’s what I look into. Just give me what you know.”

Vicki sighed and pushed her hair back.

“You don’t – it’s different, this one. It’s not a spooky story with a name like the Croc or the Clay. The idea that there’s some man who causes bad people to die like a living curse predates Gotham. It’s probably some localised version of the Cain legend – the cursed one who wanders.”

“I don’t want the mythology analysis. Can you give me specific incidents?”

She frowned. “Calm down, grumpy. Your parents try and lock you in again?”

“I’m emancipated now, thank you very much, and you know that because you did an article on it. Why do you do the soapy society stuff anyway?”

“Pays better than the freak beat. No one cares about one more bit of dirt crawling around Gotham. Ok, there’s – they’re all based on single witness testimony. There’s a story about two months back of a guy trying to rape a girl in an empty carriage on the metro. The train stops suddenly at Arkham, except that station was shut off two years ago with the construction and no one should be able to get into it. A man gets on, breaks the rapists neck, the train passes through a tunnel and when the lights come up the girl’s alone on the carriage. The rapist is found dead when some construction workers stumble across him while laying foundations. There’s a whole bunch of sightings that could be him in the unexplained folder. But who says they have to be the same guy?”

“It’s a hunch, Vicki.”

“You’ll be searching for the Court of Owls next.”

He smiled. “You know me. Lost causes and urban bullshit. Send me that file?”

 

* * *

 

 

“There’s a common thread,” said Steph, leaning over to steal far more fries than was socially acceptable.

“Um, excuse me? I was eating.”

“You were not eating, Drake. You were falling asleep under a blanket of files and letting your food go cold. Anyway, breakthroughs deserve food rewards.”

“I was not falling asleep,” Tim said, though he had been and was still halfway to nodding off. “What time is it?”

“Fuck-knows am. Anyway, Tim, focus. Common thread.”

“Arkham.”

Steph rolled her eyes. “Screw you, wonder boy. I felt so smart then for figuring it out.”

He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. “You are smart, and pretty, and I wouldn’t be able to do this without you. What do you think he’s doing there? I mean, he protects people. Why focus on one part of the city? It’s not even that densely populated there. Most of the early incidents are from near Crime Alley.”

Steph ran a hangnail between her teeth. “I think we’re looking at this wrong.”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t think he’s protecting the people. I mean, he is, but – how?”

“What do you mean, how?”                                         

“All right, look at this in the light of the theory.” The theory was their shorthand for Tim’s one big idea – that Gotham had its own malevolent energy which caused strange things to happen, that the city was changing, and that – this bit was unstated because Tim was well aware of how crazy it sounded – Gotham was somehow aware in some limited way, and transforming itself.

“In light of the theory,” Steph said, “Gotham is – a force. And it makes sense to think that he’s somehow – channelling that force? God, I sound like the Wiccan girl in my nursing class.”

“Go on.”

“So there has to be something that lets him channel that force. And I think – I think he’s protecting the city, not the people in it. I mean, he’s protecting the people but I don’t think that’s his job, exactly. So if he’s focused on Arkham and we know it’s not because of the people –“

“It’s because of the city,” Tim said, and Steph smiled at him. “Somehow the Arkham project is going to be bad for the city. But how?”

“I know how to find out, boyfriend. Want to break into a construction site with me?”

“You always did have the best date ideas.”

 

* * *

 

 

“You visit this spot every year.”

The man didn’t look startled when Jason slunk out of the shadows, which rankled a little bit. He was seventeen and slight, and if he ate any better he knew he would run to fat. Startling people was his best defence mechanism.

“Yes.” The man’s bottom lip twisted. He was biting the inside of his mouth. “It’s where – It’s a site of great personal importance.”

Jason knew what happened here. The city was still shaking with Thomas and Martha Wayne’s death, and he didn’t know why. There were a lot of places in Crime Alley he could put his hand on and mark the trajectory of a falling body. Was it because they were rich? Was that why Gotham was paying so much attention? He didn’t think so. Bodies wer bodies. But still, the details were clearer on this one – bouncing pearls, the ugly streetlight – and he thought that maybe the man himself was making the story clearer.

“I know what happened,” he said. “But it’s dangerous. You shouldn’t come out here alone.”

The man – Bruce Wayne, it had to be – tilted his head. “Shouldn’t I say the same to you?”

“I’m fine.”

“Look, I can take you to a shelter, or – I can give you a bed for the night, I promise I won’t – Jesus, this is not coming out right.”

Jason shifted his weight. A break in composure didn’t look good on Bruce Wayne.

“I know creeps, and I know you’re not one. But I can look after myself. Go home. You can’t.”

Cass didn’t know what she was looking for until she was halfway across the world from anywhere resembling home. She was in France when the word _Gotham_ hit her on a news channel. She tried it out in her mouth, the low G and the hissed th, but it probably didn’t come out right. Words didn’t, generally.

From the newscasters face, Gotham was – bad? Behind her was a video of a city block in ruins, a building twisted inside out with steel beams dripping like melted fat. (Cass had seen. She knew.) Did Gotham – do this? Was Gotham one of those people? The thing that pulled her across continents, whispered in her ear while she slept, finally had a name and she wanted to cry because she still didn’t know what it was. Maybe Gotham was the building and it would finally let her sleep at night.

(The crooked-crunch-shatter building on screen didn’t look like it could call anyone, let alone her.)

But she had a name, and she had what she’s always had – a dark compass inside her pointing the way. Maybe once she found Gotham (person/place/thing) the dark thing that unspooled inside her at night would finally wind itself up.

 

* * *

 

 

“I need books,” said Tim. “On, uh, bolt-cutting? Lock-picking? Climbing… stuff?”

Barbara looked up from her monitor. “Tim, are you… are you planning to break into somewhere?”

“No,” said Tim.

“Because if you were – you know you have a lot of money, right? You can probably bribe your way in.”

“But Barbara,” Steph whined. “Bolt-cutting lock-picking fence-vaulting action is so much more rad.”

“I thought you weren’t planning to break into anywhere,” she said, as Tim mouthed _rad_ to himself and looked sad.

“We aren’t,” said Steph. “But if we ever needed to break into a construction site. For, like, life saving stuff.”

“I’m getting you hard hats,” said Barbara. “No, fuck that, I’m getting you child leashes and jobs that put you in my sightline at all times.”

“Ok,” said Steph, “but will you get us the books first?”

 

* * *

 

 

Tim was twelve-turning-thirteen when he first got properly lost in Gotham.

He’d gone out at night to take photographs, which had been a terrible idea in itself. He’d seen an abandoned church with floodlights in the middle for the workmen tearing it down, and he’d thought about how beautiful it would look at night and then his fingers just started itching in the way they did when he had an image in his mind he needed to create. It was times like this he wished he could draw so the ideas he had so clearly in his head could get into the real world without having to do stuff like walking through the rain and sneaking out at night.

He’d gotten to the church all right. It was only eight and already darkening, the rain spitting half-heartedly in a way that left him continuously checking the sky. He set up his equipment and got the pictures he wanted – the interior of the church, still lit by the floodlights, the half-desecrated walls with marks of sledgehammers in the drywall, the whole place looking more holy open to the sky than it probably ever had when it was just another sad, semi-modern church.

It was when he tried going home that he got lost.

He was used to the easy block system of the upper-class neighbourhoods. This neighbourhood was old Gotham, not quite in the narrows but close enough to be dangerous. The streets were a tangled snarl that closed around him, trapping him in loops that didn’t look like loops and winding side-streets that turned out to be dead ends. By midnight he had the hysterical idea that this was a labyrinth, and if he just kept his left hand on the wall (not actually touching it, because god knows what or who had been on that wall) he could get out.

The technique took him deeper into the Narrows.

Tim didn’t know he was in the Narrows, of course. He’d never been there, he’d only heard about it on the news when there was another gang war or it caught on fire again and his father tutted and changed the channel when he realised Tim was in the room. But he knew with certainty that he wasn’t in the right place. It was only when he passed an apartment he knew he’d seen three times before, one with a long purple scarf dangling from the window, that he realised he’d been walking in circles.

Tim didn’t generally cry. As a child he’d once broken his wrist and it had gone unnoticed for three hours while he sat quietly and cradled it without crying. But it was at that point that he burst into tears. Ugly tears, proper childish sobbing that made him so ashamed he cried harder.

“What the hell…?”

If the voice had been adult, Tim would probably have screamed at that point. As it was, he just looked up and found a boy who wasn’t that much older than him perched on a fire escape. Not standing on the actual metal walkway, or the steps like a normal person, but standing on the edge of the railing with one arm up to hold onto the walkway above him.

“You are…” The boy trailed off. “You are so tiny. And you are definitely not meant to be here. Who are you?”

“I’m lost. I’m Tim.”

“Ok, lost Tim.” The boy rubbed his face and looked up into the sky. “God damn, the things you send me to deal with… “

“What are you talking about?”

“Nothing. Ok. I’m going to help you get home. What’s your address?”

Tim rattled it off. His voice sounded snotty and foreign in his head.

“Wow,” said the boy. “You are seriously exceptionally lost.” He pronounced _exceptionally_ like he was proud of the word, dropping it off his tongue. “All right, I’m Jason and I’m your tour guide for today. I’m going to get you home.” He dropped down to where Tim was sitting and hauled him to his feet by the hands, keeping one hand in his even when he was up. He held up the entwined hand. “Ok, this is important and you have to trust me. Do not – are you listening? – do not let go of my hand. Ever. If you need to slow down just tell me, but do not let go.”

Tim nodded, and Jason smiled and pulled him along into a patch of shadows that turned out to be a side street, then into a building and up a stairwell, along a corridor and onto a roof that looked nothing like the buildings where he’d been sitting a second ago. They went over the roof, down a ladder that went underground and then into some clean, dry tunnels that were lit only by the flashlight the boy produced from his pocket.

“It’s a shortcut,” said Jason, and Tim bit back against the urge to panic. The tunnels were beautiful in their own way. The black stone bricks shone from the water trickling down them, giving them an obsidian shine. Nothing grew on the walls here, nor was there any graffiti – just a long black slab of brick fading into the darkness. Tim wondered how far down they were.

They moved at a brisk place, not speaking, until Jason stopped with one hand on Tim’s chest. From far away, Tim heard a faint sound that could have been the footsteps of something heavy.

“It’s ok,” said Jason. “He won’t actually hurt you. He just doesn’t like newcomers. We should try not to run into him.”

“Who’s he?” said Tim.

Jason gave him an exasperated look. “Let’s put a pin in that, ok?”

He felt along the wall, the fingers enlaced with Tim’s shifting to his wrist to adjust to the angle. Eventually he pushed on a brick, and a door in the wall fell open at the same time Tim’s mouth did.

Jason winked at him and pulled him through.

And then they were climbing up stairs – old ones, though not as old as the tunnels, these were made of dark polished wood – and then they were up on the roofs again, much much higher than where they’d been before. Jason pulled him along and they started running, leaping between balconies and balancing along the narrow walls on the edge of roofs. There was the blood-red rooftops, and there was the moon, and there was the beautiful boy holding on to Tim as he guided him across the roofs, laughing into the heights. There was gunfire and car alarms and crying and singing and glittering lights and Tim was laughing with him too.

Too, too soon Jason was pulling them down onto streets Tim knew. Jason moved differently here, stopping occasionally at turnings like he was smelling the air. Eventually they were on Tim’s street, his house up ahead still dead and dark. His parents weren’t home yet.

“That your place?”

“Yeah,” said Tim. “Thanks. Do you want to come in for some cocoa?”

Jason let go of Tim’s hand and shoved his fists in his pockets. “Probably not a good idea.”

“Ok,” said Tim, resisting the urge to chew on the inside of his lip (his mother said it made him look bored). “Well, you should come round again. In the day time.”

“You don’t have to do that,” said Jason. “Helping lost kids get home is kind of my job.”

“Your job?”

“Forget about it.” He reached forward and patted Tim on the shoulder, and then he walked away and was gone, melting into the shadows faster than Tim knew what to do with. Melting wasn’t the right word – it was like as he walked into the darkness he became darkness, like a chameleon changing colour to hide against a wall.

The Wayne’s butler, Mr Pennyworth, was outside the gates as he walked up the street, groceries on the ground as he unlocked the gates to let his car through.

“You were out late, Master Timothy. Are you ok?”

“I’m fine, Mr Pennyworth. I got lost, but I’m ok.”

“A young man your age shouldn’t be out this late at night,” said Pennyworth. His voice softened slightly. “Perhaps no one should.”

“I was ok,” said Tim, smiling at the clouds. “Someone helped me.”

(Later, when he opened a map of the city and tried to trace where he’d been from the name of a bar he’d passed, he found he’d been a three hour walk from home and there was no possible way he could have gotten back that fast, whatever shortcuts there were. He tried to look into the city’s tunnels, and found every map recorded only three levels – the subways, the sewers and the old prohibition tunnels that looked nothing like the ones he had walked through, no matter how many pictures he searched through.)

 

* * *

 

 

The boat timetable informed Cass that Gotham was a where. The map on the boat told her where that was. Nothing actually told her about Gotham.

She read the tourist guides in the shop, sounding out the words she could make out and absorbing the pictures with a furious intensity. She kept on getting kicked out – she was meant to be cleaning, cash in hand with no questions asked about her background and her apparent ability to understand English without speaking it.

But she didn’t _get it,_ not until she looked out of the window one day and saw a shape on the horizon that made her mouth dry up and her pulse race. The city looked dark and twisted, and from the right angle it looked like a body lying down, the central spires making up the high rise of the shoulder, a dark hill making up the head.

She left without getting her last payment because she couldn’t stay on the ship. Gotham was waiting for her.

The city spoke to her. She thought she was going mad.

The city spoke to her in the same way that bodies spoke to her – almost the same way. This language was harsher, more jagged. She thought that if it was a voice it would sound like it was speaking through a mouthful of glass.

The curve of the harbour, the way the boats set off, said _Welcome._

The dark of the main road and the movement of the crowds said _I’ve been waiting for you._

Why, she asked. Why have you called me?

She didn’t get a reply.

Until two months later, when she was stopping a man with her fists and her feet and he was lying under her bleeding. The man attacked a woman. She could see the rush he got from her fear in his joints, see the enjoyment and the sadism twisting his arms in grotesque patterns.

It was only when she kicked him again out of anger – he was down, she didn’t need to kick him, but she kept on seeing the way he held his knife in her mind’s eye and she couldn’t stop – that she realised the city was –

She understood now. Gotham wanted her to kill for it.

“No,” she said, and she broke the man’s wrist and he screamed out _That’s what I’m saying, no, no, I’ll stop, please._

She wasn’t listening to him.

“There is… another way,” she said, and she left as the sirens homed in.


End file.
